Valentine’s Day items I used a box, heart shaped bracelets, heart shapes, and a balloon.

This activity helps:

Promote learning through all 5 senses

Build fine motor skills

Teaches Valentine’s Day themes

Teach colors, shapes, size, and texture

Teaches classification, categorizes and counting

Builds vocabulary

She started by feeling the rice with her hands.

She then started filling the box with rice

She then started to fill the box with all the glitter heart shapes. This was a great way for her to learn classification which is a pre-math skill. She was grouping the items together based on their common features.

We also used them to learn the colors red and pink. I showed her which one was pink and which was red, then we dumped them all back out and I would ask her to find the pink ones and put them back in the box. Then we did it for the red ones.

Another learning opportunity was with the bracelets. She started to put all of them in the box, so we started counting as she put them in and then would count them as she took them out.

She really loved this sensory bin. As with most sensory bins, this kept her busy for over an hour and we will keep it in our play rotation for quite a few weeks.